Opportunity Sketch

Opportunity sketches are rough drawings that allow us to explore ideas and concepts in a quick, simple way.

Opportunity sketches are rough drawings that allow us to explore ideas and concepts in a quick, simple way.

Far from full-fledged layouts, these quick ideas help us visualize high-level concepts we might work with later. A doodle that represents social sharing, for example, would be an opportunity sketch, as opposed to a sketch of an icon bar, which would be the ideation sketch that comes from the opportunity.

This is about visualizing rough ideas so we can share them with others. It’s thinking aloud, but on paper. Opportunity sketches don’t always look like an interface element or a page. They’re mental notes of a higher concept for the product. And like quick ideas, not all of them make the cut.

We make opportunity sketches fast because many of them get thrown away. Not because they’re bad, but because we make them as we go through our thought-process exercises. With new products or radical redesigns of existing products, neither we nor our client knows exactly what we’re trying to do. Before we can solve their problems we need to understand them. Sketching helps us “see” the problems. Opportunity sketches visual talking points.

We use opportunity sketches early in a project’s development, dedicating time to working through many quick ideas with sketches that communicate “what-if” scenarios to our clients. Quick sketches give us the chance to fail fast and discover opportunities — hence their name, opportunity sketches.